Doctor Explains Psilocybin Therapy

0:00 A single dose of psilocybin has been shown to relieve anxiety and depression for up to a year. It's not addictive and it naturally grows all over planet Earth. You've probably heard it called magic mushrooms, but the real story is that psilocybin is now one of the most studied medicines for the healing of the human brain and nervous system. Hi, I'm Dr. Tracy Kim Townsen. I'm a licensed medical doctor, psilocybin facilitator, and co-founder of Meadow, which is the world's first legal psychedelic medicine practice founded by a physician. After practicing surgery for years, I came to see firsthand just how broken our healthcare system is. And psilocybin became an integral part of my own healing journey. Here's what most people don't realize, though. Psilocybin is not just treating depression and anxiety.

0:46 The real breakthrough is how it reshapes brain connections and that changes everything about how we understand mental health. So, let's break down what psilocybin is, how it works, and why researchers are calling it one of the most promising medicines of our time. By the way, this video, as well as all of my content, is for educational purposes only. So, what exactly is psilocybin? Well, psilocybin is the psychoactive component of psilocybin containing mushrooms of which there are over 180 species that grow all over planet earth. In fact, they grow on every continent except for Antarctica and they have been used throughout history and in various cultures for religious, ceremonial or therapeutic and healing purposes. Psilocybin is a member of the class of

1:33 compounds known as psychedelics where psyche comes from the Greek word for soul or mind and delic comes from the Greek word for manifesting or revealing. And so psychedelics are thought to be soul manifesting or mind revealing. Notably psychedelics exert their effects without altering your alertness, attentiveness or memory. And so the psychedelic experience is a rich one in which we feel more lucid or more aware than even in our regular default state of mind when we're going about our daily life. All of these functions are preserved in a psychedelic journey. This is also notably different than seditive substances like alcohol which decrease your alertness, decrease your memory.

2:20 Psychedelics also don't work through the misolyic reward system or the dopamineergic system and so they're not known to be habit forming or to be a drug of abuse. This makes them different from other psychoactive or consciousness altering substances that do. And in fact, in a famous UK drug harm study, psilocybin mushrooms were ranked as the least harmful substance both individually and collectively. Thanks to renewed interest by institutions like John's Hopkins, NYU, Imperial College of London, and UCSF, psilocybin was given breakthrough therapy status by the FDA both in 2018 and again in 2019 for the treatment of depression and treatment

3:05 resistant depression. It has also been shown to be immensely helpful in conditions like anxiety, especially existential anxiety, PTSD, addiction, and grief processing. Biochemically speaking, psilocybin is very similar to serotonin, the neurotransmitter that's responsible for regulating our mood, our cognition, and our perception. They are both tryptoamine derivatives. In fact, the chemical name for serotonin is five hydroxyryptamine. And because of this structural similarity, psilocybin has activity at the serotonin receptors that are in our brain but also distributed throughout our nervous system and throughout various tissues in our bodies. When you eat mushrooms, the psilocybin is

3:51 metabolized into the active metabolite called solosin, which then crosses the bloodb brain barrier and has activity on many different neuro receptors throughout our nervous system and bodies, but primarily it acts at the 5HT2A serotonin receptor, which is a subtype of serotonin receptor. And this receptor is highly expressed in our brain so-called default mode network. This alters or expands our state of consciousness and changes are experienced in our mood, our perception, our thought processes. Other effects include visual or auditory distortions. Frequently, one can experience something called senesthesia, where colors are heard or sounds are seen, changes in

4:39 one's sense of time and space, heightened emotional states or increased emotionality, and also transpersonal or mystical states can be experienced. Now, here's where it gets really fascinating. Psilocybin doesn't just tweak brain chemistry. It alters the way that the brain is actually connected to itself. Functional MRI studies have shown that psilocybin quiets down the default mode network. So this is the network that writes our autobiography. It's the network that engages in overanalyzing in self-directed thought loops projecting into the far past or into the far future. In other words, it's the part of our brain that's tied to our inner narrator. One theory is that

5:26 conditions like anxiety and depression involve an overactive default mode network. So during a psilocybin journey when the default mode network goes quiet it allows other neural networks in the brain to come online so to speak and so the volume of that inner narrator gets turned down and then other aspects of ourselves get to be heard and experienced. And instead of cycling through the same fears, worries and judgments, people often describe a feeling of expansion or compassion or just relief. Suddenly the same old patterns can be seen with this fresh perspective. And this can catalyze a series of breakthroughs or insights. It can help us to metabolize emotions,

6:13 whatever emotional debt we've been carrying, which then leads to a cathartic release and a reprocessing of old memories. This is a big difference between psychedelics and anti-depressants. So anti-depressants are designed to numb or suppress turn down the emotional salience and hence why a lot of people feel like their emotions are flattened on the anti-depressant medications. Whereas with psychedelics, emotional salience is heightened. But because the default mode network is quieted, those are our normal ego defenses that tell us it's unsafe to feel these certain feelings. We actually get to feel the feelings to reprocess and to transform the formerly stuck patterns that we found ourselves in.

7:00 Now, while the journey session itself is quite therapeutic, what's really magical about magic mushrooms is the increased neuroplasticity that's available for several weeks after just one dosing session. And neuroplasticity is the ability for us to adapt and change to new experiences and also to modify existing neural pathways that develop to prior conditioning that we received in life. So during this period of increased neuroplasticity after the journey which is known as integration one can very intentionally reprogram old thoughts, stories, beliefs and patterns into new stories, new beliefs and new patterns of behavior.

7:45 And it's especially helpful when working with someone who can support you in this process. Whether it's a close friend or a therapist, a psychedelic informed therapist I recommend, or a coach or something like that, somebody who can help hold you accountable in that process and also act as a mirror to help reflect to you areas where you may continue to gain new insights. We now have so many randomized double blind placeboc controlled trials which are the gold standard in clinical studies for the use of psilocybin which have been published in many different prestigious medical journals such as the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine and psilocybin is now one of the most well-ressearched psychedelics today. This is one of the most impressive

8:31 studies which is a study out of John's Hopkins that showed just two doses of psilocybin led to the relief of depression out to one year. 75% of the participants in this trial showed this effect and then over half of them were in complete remission from their depression diagnosis meaning they no longer met clinical criteria for the diagnosis of depression. We just don't see results like that for any other intervention. Another fascinating study that looked at the functional MRI scans. So these are MRI scans of people who took psilocybin and they looked at the activity of their brain while they're on the psilocybin journey. And it showed that there was this quieting down of the default mode network and the connections

9:18 between the default mode network and the executive regions of the brain. And so there is this increased interconnectivity in regions that weren't previously talking to each other before. Research into psilocybin is ongoing and I like to share about it in other videos on my channel. So stay tuned for that. But I can also personally speak to the transformative power of this medicine for helping me with my own sense of interconnectedness and well-being. This medicine helped me to not only survive residency but to actually thrive during that period of my life and has changed every aspect whether it's my work, my relationships, the way that I relate to the world in general and it's all for the better.

10:04 Hence why I'm so passionate about sharing about this medicine. And I hope that this video was helpful and valuable, informative. And um if you have any questions, please do leave them in the comments. I try to read every comment and use it as inspiration for other videos. Thank you so much. If you can like, subscribe, share, it helps our channel to grow. And I will see you soon.